Many commercial products incorporate components that are monitored. The data that is collected regarding the monitored component is then reported to a monitoring object, such as a human. The collected data is often reported as a performance measurement or a key performance indicator (KPI). KPIs are often used to characterize the performance, time to complete a task, resource usage, maintenance issues and/or additional characteristics of the monitored component. For example, for a product that incorporates a cache component, the KPIs may specify the cache size, a cache refresh timestamp, a number of cache hits and a number of cache misses.
Currently, KPIs are specified by the providers of the monitored components and the products that incorporate the monitored components cannot control the scope of the reported data. A need therefore exists for techniques that allow a product to configure the granularity of key performance indicators that are available from a monitored component.